Greek doctor guilty over death of Briton left on trolley

A Greek junior doctor was convicted yesterday of the manslaughter of a British man who died after being left unattended on a hospital trolley following a 40ft fall.

Christopher Rochester, 24, of Chester-le-Street, County Durham, was on holiday with his brother and friends in the resort of Faliraki in June 2000 when he fell from his hotel balcony, apparently while drunk. He died from internal bleeding after being left on the trolley for three hours.

Stergios Pavlidis was found guilty of manslaughter by neglect by three judges at Rhodes magistrates court yesterday and sentenced to 15 months in prison, suspended for three years. Two other doctors, Georgos Karavolias and Mihalis Sokorelos, were cleared of manslaughter.

Rochester's mother, Pam Cummings, and his stepfather, George Cummings, had pursued the case through the Greek courts for eight years. In 2002 Pavlidis, Karavolias and Sokorelos, who all worked at the island's Andreas Papandreou hospital, were convicted of manslaughter by neglect and jailed for three years.

However, their sentences were deferred until after they appealed, and three years later they had their convictions overturned. Mr and Mrs Cummings challenged the ruling and the Greek supreme court ordered a retrial, which took place this week. Mrs Cummings maintains that her son died because he did not receive the proper treatment. Mrs Cummings, who had urged the judges to convict the three doctors so that she could grieve properly, said she was pleased with the verdict. An inquest in Britain into Rochester's death recorded a verdict of accidental death contributed to by neglect.

Reacting to the news that the three doctors would probably be free to continue practising, Mrs Cummings said: "Greek justice is not true justice, that's my opinion. Even when all three were originally convicted they continued to work pending the outcome of their appeal."

Sokorelos, an orthopaedic surgeon, said he was "very sad" about what had happened but said neither he nor his colleagues were to blame. "You get many cases like this of drunk people coming into hospital," he said. "Do the doctors get taken before the courts?"

The family is now expected to launch a civil case against Pavlidis and the hospital seeking £3.7m in damages.

A separate investigation has been launched to try to determine what happened to one of Rochester's kidneys. When his body was returned to the UK, a postmortem examination found that a kidney was missing. The family believes the organ was destroyed because it would have shown that he had not died from a ruptured kidney - as the Greeks claim - but from internal bleeding.